“Many patients, particularly asthma patients, but also CFS patients, have a sensation that they are not getting enough oxygen to their tissues. Their response to this is to breathe more deeply. However blood cannot become more than 100% saturated with oxygen. All that happens is that more carbon dioxide is washed out of the blood. This makes oxygen cling more fiercely to haemoglobin in red blood cells and therefore oxygen delivery to the tissues is made worse! Paradoxically, to improve oxygen supply to the tissues you have to breathe less! Breathing less increases carbon dioxide levels and improves oxygen delivery.”

b) Low levels of CO2 reduce blood flow to the brain

Dr Medows researches orthostasis (feel worse when standing) and ME/CFS “Some of those with ME/CFS and orthostasis (feel worse when standing) also experience very rapid, deep breathing during an orthostatic challenge, like trying to catch your breath after strenuous exercise. This hyperventilation, in turn, leads to reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, or affecting the pH of the body. And, guess what? One of the most powerful modulators of brain blood flow happens to be CO2. The lower the CO2, the lower the cerebral blood flow.”

Dr. Medow’s hypothesis: that the reduced cerebral blood flow and brain fog occurs, at least in part, because of impaired control mechanisms for regulating C02 and/or blood pressure.

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Yes, self-improvement is about awareness and sticking with it, it’s not just for January.

I love this inspirational quote from Doe Zantamata:

Self-improvement is a big job.

It’s like rebuilding a house. Some things need a little touch up, some could use repair, and sometimes a whole section needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

But it can’t just be non-stop work.

You need rest. A good meal. A day off to enjoy the sunshine or just do fun stuff without thinking much at all.

It may feel like you want to just get everything fixed right now but you’ve got to be patient with yourself and step back and admire all the work you’ve done and are doing along the way.

That’s the only way to stay encouraged for the long haul.

Real and lasting self-improvement is a lifetime achievement, not an overnight success.

-Doe Zantamata

And here is a real-life story of someone I know that mirrors much of this. Sticking with it is certainly a theme here too. Steve Darch, a breathing educator colleague has kindly allowed me share his story of:

Recovery from Chronic Asthma, COPD stage 2 and Bronchiectasis

“I played 36 holes of golf yesterday on a very hilly course and carried my clubs despite it being very wet and muddy underfoot.
I was never at any point out of breath, my energy and concentration levels were good and woke up this morning with no aches and pains!!

If five ýears ago having been hospitalised on a regular basis and diagnosed with Chronic Asthma, COPD stage 2, Bronchiectasis and taking every medication ever invented someone had told me I was going to be able to do this I would have laughed in their face.

I believe that my healing process is still continuing and although getting older I feel younger and more energetic by the year.

I can 100% put this down to correcting my breathing.

Since changing my breathing I have lost around three stone and maintained this loss (three years) despite at times not eating or drinking as I should. Coming off medication and in particular steroid medication and reduced emotional eating improved my digestive system as well. (NB never come off medications without your doctor’s consent, as this could be dangerous. Steve could only reduce his medications because his condition had improved).

I still monitor my breathing on a regular basis but have learnt to enjoy the breathing exercises and these are now built into my daily lifestyle.

I have been signed off by my NHS Consultant and my lung function continues to improve.

At the same time I have seen a huge reduction in lung infections, coughs, allergies, flu etc.

This did not happen overnight!!!

From observing my clients many expect unrealistic changes to happen quickly and give up on their breathing exercises too quickly because it can be hard work and involves personal discipline and effort.

I believe change happens slowly and gradually and we sometimes forget how far we have moved forward since changing our breathing.

If we also consider with ageing and continuous medication how our health might be now if still hyperventilating the changes for me have been massive”.

Dr Buteyko defined stress as anything that causes you to breathe more than you need to.

Stress can be emotional or physical.

A good example is someone I know who sustained a very nasty broken leg in a skiing accident. She had the initial physical stress and pain of the injury to deal with; suboptimal surgery in a non- state -of -the -art foreign hospital, of painful travel home; emotional stresses insurance to sort out, weeks off work, immobility, worry about the future, many, many visits to hospital for X- rays that showed lack of annealing of the fracture; the stress of expecting to see the consultant who could handle the complicated case but seeing junior doctors who gave conflicting advice; further surgery and bone grafts; physical stress of more pain and 6 months of having to sleep on her back to keep the injured leg straight. (You can breathe up to twice as much sleeping on your back as your side).

Not surprisingly her breathing pattern suffered. You get the picture, chronic stress can lead to chronic hyperventilation/disordered breathing pattern.

And what are the symptoms of disordered breathing/hyperventilation? Numerous, including increased pain and panic, which can make you breathe more, depleting your body oxygen and causing a vicious cycle.

A client with ME/CFS described rather well the time leading up to her health collapse as “a decade of crises”- the breathing can slide into abnormality without you noticing, and stay that way as it is eventually accepted as normal. For some, ill health comes out of the blue or “I was fine until I had that cough, then I never really got better” but for many “I just didn’t feel right for several years” with IBS/anxiety e.t.c. creeping up on them.

Many women in their 40’s may find themselves sandwiched between the demands of teenage offspring and aging parents, also holding down a job, with their own needs being ignored.

With today’s culture, many people put their job before their health, dosing up on decongestants when they have the flu and soldiering on rather than resting and recuperating.

The work/life balance is a difficult one, I heard someone say she doesn’t have time to look after her health while she is working –it’s OK for retired people! Something badly wrong there….

Luckily a disordered breathing pattern is something that can be put right; surely it is worth it to safeguard your future health, or improve your current health…If you would like an email alert for new blog posts, please sign up below:

Over breathing or hyperventilation is breathing more than the body’s requirement at any given time, so if you are seated quietly, but breathing as much as you would need for walking, that is hyperventilation. So you can breathe too many breaths per minute, or too much air per breath, or both. The blood gases can then get out of balance; one of the important changes can be low body carbon dioxide (CO2) or hypocapnia.Continue Reading

A client asked me recently “Why not write a topic about what deep breathing actually means in the Buteyko context?” So here goes, I am preparing to open a can of worms… But before I do that I will just recap that as a breathing educator I identify and help to correct (using the Buteyko method), disordered or dysfunctional breathing and that:The aim of breathing education is to restore a healthy breathing pattern, to allow the natural, normal, nasal, soft, gentle, smooth, quiet, invisible, efficient, underlying breathing pattern to emerge, so breathing is easier and with the diaphragm free. The most effective way of doing this is by relaxation; by removal of layers of tension caused by bad breathing habits and stress. As the breathing softens and reduces, symptoms decrease too. Dr Buteyko called his method “reduced breathing by relaxation”.And when I teach I avoid the word DEEP like the plague! That is because it is so utterly confusing as it means two (at least) completely different things to different people:Continue Reading

The previous better breathing blog post was all about the importance of breathing through your nose, but even before you focus on nasal breathing, you have to cultivate good awareness of your breathing; many people tell me they breathe through their noses, but I observe them mouth breathing without realising. If you have never thought it mattered, why would you notice? I used to be the same. I certainly did not notice that I was taking in gasping breaths through my mouth when I was speaking. Now I can breathe in calmly through my nose when speaking, most of the time anyway.

Remember that the MORE you breathe, the LESS oxygen you are getting. Continue Reading

About me/ contact

You can sign up to Breathing Remedies newsletter here. Information on posture and breathing and how they affect health.

Or phone me 01663 743055 (Dr Janet Winter)

Hello, I am Janet, a Breathing educator, (Buteyko Breathing Method) and I help people recover from asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety, sleep problems, headaches, IBS chronic fatigue (ME/CFS) and more, by improving their dysfunctional breathing. Both myself and my teenage son have recovered from ME/CFS, and I want to help more people with these devastating illnesses.

I trained to be a Breathing Educator with Jennifer Stark and Savio D’Souza. Jennifer has been teaching Buteyko for almost 20 years and conducted several of the successful asthma clinical trials of the Buteyko method in the West. (The Buteyko Method relieves asthma symptoms, and has been listed in the UK Asthma Guideline since 2008).
I am a member of the Buteyko Breathing Educators Association and am fully insured.

I am also a qualified postural alignment specialist (PAS) trained by Nicole Lourens of the Egoscue University. Good posture is essential for good breathing and proper function in general.

I had been involved in healthcare/biomedical research for 30 years although previously in a very different role: before training as a Breathing educator, I spent 20 years in drug discovery looking for new painkillers for a major pharmaceutical company based in a London Institute.
I worked as a neuroscientist and cell biologist, directing a team of bench scientists. (So I am not a medical doctor but I have a PhD in Neuroscience) I authored or co-authored more than 50 journal articles and reviews on my research. I have also worked as a medical writer, so have a firm grounding in evidence-based medicine. My professional profile can be seen here on LINKEDIN.

Why I became a breathing educator

If you are reading this because you have CFS/ME, I know what you are going through. I know what it is like to hold onto a job by my fingernails, worried about how we would feed the family if I lost my job, come home and eat and sleep and spend my weekend recovering.
I had no social life. I was lucky to quickly get to a consultant who diagnosed me with candidiasis, and anti-fungals and a yeast and sugar-free diet helped a lot, but not enough.
I felt I had been “written off” and had nothing to offer. I was a mum, partner and employee with massively reduced physical and mental output compared with previously. I suspected my symptoms were “stress related” but they did not ease when I left my stressful job and moved out of London to the countryside.
For me (after trying many different avenues, cranial osteopathy, chiropractic, mercury amalgam filling removal and more – I became a “fat-folder patient”), breathing education worked, it was a big missing piece of my health puzzle, and one I had frankly never considered.

Changing my breathing back to a more normal pattern really helped me. One definition of stress is “anything that makes you breathe more”. And I know now that breathing too much can actually deplete the body of oxygen. And stress can be emotional or physical. Looking back on my history I can clearly see my own physical and emotional stresses accumulating, from a very traumatic bereavement, on-going work and family stresses, then a really bad summer respiratory infection and cough that was not shifted by two different antibiotics (but they probably contributed to unbalancing my gut flora, hence the fungal overgrowth/candidiasis).

A cough seems to be one of the best ways to mess up your breathing pattern, and many of my clients tell me “I was fine until I had that cough/chest infection, and I never really got my health back!!” The breathing centre in the brain gets to think that big volume breathing is normal and unless you know about it, it is sometimes hard to recover. Luckily you CAN retrain your breathing by doing a series of gentle exercises and making some life style changes, and you CAN have hope of better health.
So that is why I do what I do and why I am passionate about it; I found a way to improve my chronic fatigue by better breathing and I trained as a breathing educator so I could help others with this devastating disease. There is so little help out there for them (you?).

Then chronic backache made good breathing impossible, and I discovered postural alignment therapy (Egoscue) to help with that. And I am still amazed at the progress I am making -it’s wonderful to have decreased pain and increased function when I had accepted decline at my age was inevitable. It’s not!